


Bodies and other haunted things

by historymiss



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 23:54:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21044864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: Harrowhark Nonagesimus has been haunted since the day she was born.For necromanticatheart, in thanks for the beautiful comments left on my last two Gideon fics.





	Bodies and other haunted things

Harrowhark Nonagesimus has been haunted since the day she was born. She knows what it is to live with the ghost of someone else’s body overlaid on yours, the whisper of thoughts not your own like a song just on the edge of hearing. She was born to be a tomb, and in this way Lyctorhood isn’t so different to what she knows.

Still, it takes her four days to look in a mirror.

Necessity drives her to it. What little paint survived the battle at Canaan House has completely worn off by then, and if Harrow is going to face Ianthe Tridentarius again she will do it as the esteemed Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, not a puffy-eyed, hollowed out teen. Slowly, she drags herself from her cot and approaches the mirror next to the sonic, working her eyes up as she nerves herself to look. 

There is shining black tile. A shelf. The Emperor’s attendants have thoughtfully left her a pot of ashen paint and a fat black stick of char. The edge of the mirror, bolted to the wall without even a faint corona of rust to distinguish it.

Her shoulders, thin and clad in black and shaking treacherously.

Her face.

Harrow lets out a ragged breath, something deep and hollow from the very bottom of her lungs. Nothing of Gideon lives there.

_What did you expect, Nonagesimus?_ She lifts her fingers to the glass, slick as blood under her touch. _Red hair?_

She closes her eyes and rests her forehead next to her hand, letting the cool of the surface deep into her skin.

There it is. A warmth at her back. The sense of a presence. Harrow holds her breath and leans back into the memory of Gideon’s touch.

They had done this only once. After the pool, and the moment that had sheared her in two more than Ianthe floating in a nebula woven from her own blood, more than Griddle speared on iron above an endless sea. 

She had collapsed into her bed, exhausted, and Gideon had followed suit. Harrow had no energy or inclination left to argue her off it. Her veins felt empty of everything but dust.

They’d lain there like that for emperor knows how long- somewhere between two endless heartbeats and a myriad- until Harrow felt, very gently, the pressure of Gideon’s hand on her hip.

“My crepuscular queen.” Her voice was fond, and sleepy, and burned Harrow far more effectively than any ward the long vanished denizens of Canaan House could ever devise.

Harrow remembers that she hissed, but it was a tired, boneless thing, and before Harrow’s brain could object to any part of what her body was doing, she‘d wiggled herself further into the crook formed by Gideon’s body.

The bed had creaked, and Harrow remembers how she’d felt, that one moment, not entombed (as she has been all her life) but safe.

This feeling, here, in a cold and lonely bathroom on the galaxy’s least fun cruise, is not quite the same. It’s not quite enough.

Harrow puts her own hand on her shoulder, and cavalier calluses whisper on her skin. 

It’s all she has, anymore.


End file.
